PhotographyThe word "snapshot" originated as a hunting term, and refers to a shot that is fired quickly and without careful aim, writes Jane Powers
One of the first times it was used in print to describe a photograph was in the New York Times in 1896. The "snap-shot photographs" in question were taken by "complaining citizens" as evidence of the illicit activities of Patrick J Gleason, the notoriously corrupt, Irish-born mayor of Long Island City. The mayor, along with his "law-defying gamblers and plug-uglies" had been running seven gambling houses and pool rooms within a block of his office. The pictures, according to the newspaper, "not only show the gamblers crowding into the unlawful places, but Mayor Gleason hobnobbing with them".
Those photos were taken in an entirely different spirit from the light-hearted and hopeful mood that usually generates what we now think of as snapshots. Yet they would not have been possible before the invention of the hand-held camera, which first appeared in 1881, when Thomas Bolas patented his "detective camera". In 1895, the year before the righteous Long Island citizens' snapshots, Eastman Kodak introduced its popular "Pocket Kodak", and although one needed a rather large pocket for the small box camera, its relative lightness and inexpensive price ($5) made it accessible to the man in the street.
MORE THAN ANY other camera brand, Kodak moved the making of photographs into the amateur domain. Clever marketing ensured that buyers felt part of a special community: those who used the cameras became Kodakers, and the name - short, unique and impossible to mispronounce (and concocted by manufacturer George Eastman) - also became a verb. "Darling! Don't forget to Kodak little Johnny's birthday cake!"
The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888-1978 (with essays by Sarah Greenough, Diane Waggoner, Sarah Kennel and Matthew S Witkovsky) is a hefty, 294-page, hardback catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of the same name, currently running at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The selection of over 200 snapshots is from an 8,500-strong collection, amassed over the last 10 years by Seattle-based collector Robert E Jackson.
THE BOOK CHRONICLES and depicts four ages of amateur photos: from 1888 (when the first Kodak was released) until the end of the first World War; the brave new world of the 1920s and 1930s when cameras became lighter, film became faster, and the American Dream was born; the post-war 1940s and 1950s when that dream was at its prime, and when 70 per cent of American families owned the camera essential for capturing it; and, finally, the 1960s and 1970s, when the camera was everywhere, and life became a series of events ritualised in snapshots.
The earliest snapshots are the most appealing. Their subjects - families, friends, children, workmates - are vibrant, shy and even a bit gormless. Only recently released from the grim, stony-faced solemnities of studio photography, they might still be a little uncertain about such informal behaviour in front of the lens. But these gentle iconoclasts give it their all: dancing a genteel cancan, dressing up in costumes, training the dog, enacting tableaux - and above all, smiling. This last activity had previously been considered too vulgar for photography (almost unthinkable nowadays when most two-year-olds have mastered the craft of looking winsomely toothy).
By the 1920s, the camera was well ensconced in the American way of life: taking photos was a sport and an entertainment. Kodak obligingly instructed users how to "Make Silhouettes the Kodak Way" (with the aid of various bits of helpful apparatus that one might purchase). The camera was also proffered as a fashion accessory: the Kodak Ensemble was "The Gift for the Modern Young Woman", and included camera, lipstick, rouge, powder compact, mirror and change compartment in a single, neat case: all the "necessities for proper make-up and good snapshots".
Taking pictures was also presented as a moral duty. In a 1936 advertisement, two businessmen peruse snapshots, while one of them, his face darkly troubled, supplies the headline: "I Felt Ashamed: He was so proud of his children, why hadn't I taken snapshots of mine?"
IN LATER DECADES, the camera became omnipresent; the advent of flash attachments meant it could now advance indoors, a place from where the lack of good light had previously excluded it. The 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of candid snapshots, and the occasional presence of the camera as an intruder, or a voyeur.
In 1963, Kodak brought out the Instamatic, and to deal with the millions of snapshots that the cheap and foolproof cameras fired off, the company manufactured processing machines able to spit out 3,000 prints an hour. Nine years later, rival brand Polaroid launched its popular SX-70. Both cameras produced square-format prints - which then became the shape of more than half of the snapshots of the 1960s and 1970s.
By the late 1970s, Americans were taking more than 8.9 billion snapshots a year. This book shows a tiny scattering of them, but they vibrate with the busy hum of humanity. Each one is anonymous, taken by a forgotten snapshooter. But the subject matter is deeply familiar. It is the story of Everyman: the story of all of us.
Jane Powers is an Irish Times columnist and an occasional photographer. She spent several years of her childhood in the United States
The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888-1978 runs until the end of this month at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. See www.nga.gov/snapshot
The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888-1978 (from the collection of Robert E Jackson) Essays by Sarah Greenough, Diane Waggoner, Sarah Kennel and Matthew S Witkovsky National Gallery of Art/Princeton University Press, 294pp. $55